EnMasse has released a new spooky themed trailer for their upcoming MMO, TERA. In the style of a Grimm Fairy Tale, the video tells a story of a young woman who find trouble after venturing into the woods. While the video doesn't show off a lot of new content, it does feature a few of the games more TERA-fying creatures. I wonder if that shape-shifting hag will be a boss? She better hand out candy.

Indie strategy designer Vic Davis just announced his next game, The Occult Chronicles. Openly inspired by board game adventures like Mansions of Madness and Betrayal at House on the Hill, Occult Chronicles is about a paranormal investigator trying to unearth the secrets of an ancient estate.

Mansions of Madness, if you haven't played it, is a dungeon crawl board where the map is revealed by drawing tiles randomly, and assembling them into a floor plan. Along the way you encounter monsters, puzzles, useful items, and other adventure paraphernalia.

In his announcement, Davis explained how the game would work. "You play an agent of the O.D.D (Occult Defense Directorate) who has been assigned to check out some bumps in the night at an ancient estate out in the country. Before each game you choose a mission (or ask for a random one). This will determine who the final boss is and what clues you need to collect to find it and take care of it."

I got in touch with Davis to ask him about what he's planning for this game, which he describes as a bit like a "rogue-like lite."

"Betrayal at House on the Hill has been a long time favorite of mine because of the excitement you have as the room tiles are laid out and you never know what odd combinations of items or omens you are going to power up with," he says. "I took a room tile approach with this game but I've tried to build a map engine that lays out an intelligent floor plan.. so you have a servants' area, kitchen and dinning areas, living rooms and a pattern of corridors that make more sense than your random tile draws do."

Unfortunately, as cooperative as the board games are, Davis doesn't see Occult Chronicles as being a good place for co-op multiplayer. "The biggest shortcoming that I can see this game rectifying is the lack of good solitaire playing with these types of board games. As far as multiplayer goes, I'm not sure this would really be a good fit. This game is a thinking man's rogue like. You just don't go around bashing things with a sword. In my experience cooperative games have to be more about action than planning and thinking."

When he isn't been dressing as Spock for our Star Trek themed Artemis feature, Graham has been playing Battlefield 3, and he picked up on a bit of slightly odd behaviour from one of his squadmates. Witness as the the man casually ambles through a wall before turning around and coming back as if nothing has happened. It's almost like he's saying "What? I was just breaking the laws of time and space, it's no big deal." It's the best kind of gaming bug, not particularly damaging to the experience, but really funny.

Check inside for a wall phasing selection of PC gaming news.

Update: EA have contacted us to let us know that the Darkspore issue has now been resolved.

Avalanche Studios have told Eurogamer that the rumours of Just Cause 3 being released next year aren't true. Rock Paper Shotgun report that Darkspore has been taken offline by DRM failure. EA have kindly let us know that this issue has been resolved. Dualshockers report that Peter Hines has been re-assuring Skyrim fans that yes, the game really does only require a 6GB install, and no, that doesn't mean it's light on content, just well compressed. G4 have some (very short) footage of Saints Row 3's co-op mode, showing one player using an attack drone to clear a path for another. CVG let us know that Dead Rising 2: Off the Record has released a 'Cyborg skills' DLC pack. Gaygamer report on controversy emerging from the end ceremony at Blizzcon. Shacknews say pre-ordering Trine 2 will get you beta access.

Have you fun into any bugs yet in Battlefield 3 readers? Are they funny or annoying?

Extra special bonus question: What did you think of our Star Trek impersonation?

One week ago, Introversion dramatically announced that they have shifted development away from their procedural bank-heist sim, Subversion to work a completely new game for submission to the Independent Games Festival. Their new game is called Prison Architect. It lets players construct and maintain high security prisons. We got in touch with Introversion's Chris Delay to find out why the team decided to put Subversion on hold, how they made the decision to drop a game that they've been working on for years, and what inspired them to make Prison Architect instead.

PC Gamer: From what we saw on the outside, Subversion looked ambitious, fresh and exciting, with some fantastic tech behind it. Why did you decide to put the project on indefinite hiatus?

Chris Delay: It certainly was all those things, but we struggled to find a really solid “core game” within the tech that we’d developed. We did what no game designer should do – we had more fun making the game tech than players would ever have playing it. There has to be some action at the core of a game, that is typically repeated thousands of times, that is simply fun and rewarding to do again and again. Everything else is theme and setting, which are also crucial, but they have to be built on the foundations of a core game. We worked on Subversion for so long that we struggled to remember what the game was supposed to be about. Eventually we realised there simply wasn’t a core game, and no amount of technology or polish would solve that.

PC Gamer: Will Introversion eventually return to try and finish Subversion, or is it more likely that it'll become an important lesson, but never materialise as a full release?

Chris Delay: The way we think about it, Subversion has become fertile ground for our future projects. We’ve had several ideas that are based on Subversion already, Prison Architect is just one of them. Certainly the game we’ve talked about in our blog will never be released – if we do go back to Subversion we will be making some fundamental changes. We wouldn’t go back to it now unless we felt we could reach the core game very quickly indeed – we are done with years of open ended tech development.

PC Gamer: What lessons have you learned from your work on Subversion that you'll carry through to work on Prison Architect and future projects?

Chris Delay: Probably the biggest lesson is to get to the core game as quickly as possible, whatever the cost. With Subversion we had this idea that if we just developed an incredible simulation of a procedurally generated world, that a game would emerge from it. We thought it would be enough to have a massively interactive world – just think of the possibilities! So we just kept throwing more tech at the problem, developing newer and more complex simulations, hoping an emergent game would be waiting for us at the end. We should have seen the danger signs with that earlier I think.

PC Gamer: In the post announcing the shift from Subversion to Prison Architect, you mentioned that you "could see how much of the tech that we’d designed for Subversion was directly applicable." Can you talk about any themes or technology that will be making the jump from Subversion into Prison Architect?

Chris Delay: There was an unfinished mission in Subversion where you had to bust a team member out from a maximum security prison. This mission had loads of specialist code for simulating the inner workings of prisons, and the behaviours of guards and prisoners. It was far too ambitious for its own good, much like most of Subversion. The core idea had been to simulate a prison in a lot of detail, then just let the player figure out how to bust his teammate out by exploiting whatever loopholes in the security setup he could find. It’s a nice idea in principle, but in reality that kind of unbounded thinking is what ended Subversion. After all the work required to do a prison properly, most players would probably just blow a hole in the wall with explosives and headshot the guards anyway.

However we did have a map editor for Subversion, and I’d been working on producing a plausible prison layout for the mission. And I’d found that laying out that map was actually quite a lot of fun. I spent a lot longer tinkering with my prison layout than playing the mission.

PC Gamer: You mentioned in your announcement that the idea for Prison Architect sprung almost fully formed into your brain. Where did that idea come from?

Chris Delay: I was actually on holiday in San Francisco with my wife, and I’d been thinking quite a lot about Subversion and what was going wrong with it. I was toying with various radical rethinks of the core idea, trying to find something that was interesting. Three things then happened : we took a tour around Alcatraz, which was absolutely amazing because it’s such an atmospheric place to visit. I then made a connection to the prison mission in Subversion, but imagined turning the whole thing on its head – let the player build the prison and setup the security. In other words, I wanted to build Alcatraz, not escape from it. The core of the game was set down right there, before I even got off the boat and back onto land! Then the third thing is that I was thinking quite a lot about this new idea in the taxi home from the airport, and the taxi driver turned out to be an ex-prison guard in one of Her Majesty’s Prisons in the UK. So I spent about two hours taking notes from this guy about all the things that had happened to him, and all the things he’d seen over the years. And I could just see gameplay in virtually everything he said about how jails worked.

PC Gamer: How did everyone react when you returned from holiday with a whole new game idea?

Chris Delay: My wife spent quite a while trying to talk me out of it actually. I was telling her that I was thinking about dropping Subversion altogether, and switching onto a new idea that I’d had literally that morning. It had to be done though, to be honest I’d been looking for a way out of Subversion for a few months before the idea for Prison Architect came forward. I’d been trying to find ways to cut it down to the bare essentials, or release it somehow in a very early state, but basically they were all attempts to get out of having to finish it, because I couldn’t really see how to.

I actually planned how to present the news to the other guys at Introversion quite carefully, because I knew it could go down very badly indeed. They’d been waiting for me to “get it together” with Subversion for years as well. In the end I actually gave a powerpoint presentation on the new idea, and the need for us to change to it! I had my core messages very clearly thought out, because I really did think this could be a company ending moment if I delivered it wrongly! In the end it wasn’t that tough to sell the idea to them, because I think they could see the potential in the new idea straight away as well, and they also shared my worries about Subversion going off the rails forever. So from that first meeting we agreed to put subversion on hold and do a six week “first playable” of Prison Architect, and by the end of that period we already had more of a game than Subversion had ever been.

PC Gamer: You mentioned scribbling the design brief onto a notepad on the flight home, and how that reminded you of working on Uplink. And Prison Architect will be the first game you've submitted to the IGF since Darwinia. Does the new project feel like a symbolic return to Introversion's roots? A new beginning?

Chris Delay: Certainly the hand written notepad feels like a return to Introversion’s roots – its exactly how Uplink started its life, in a notebook I carried around at university. It’s difficult to say though, Introversion is definitely a different company now than it was then, not least because we are all different people now. But there’s something very satisfying about having a core game documented in ten hand written pages or so, that remain the principle guide to the game even now.

PC Gamer: Does spending six years on one project rob it of some of its freshness? Is it more exciting to be working on something new for the first time in a while?

Chris Delay: Although Subversion has been in development for that long, you have to remember that we’ve shipped Defcon, Multiwinia and Darwinia+ in that time, as well as a couple of unreleased projects like Chronometer! So Subversion has always been a background project, until about 2 years ago I think. Subversion was always the exciting new project, and never really got boring because we were always developing such cool stuff, and we were picking up great feedback from the press and our fans about what we were doing. It was only once we started work on it fulltime, and we never seemed to be able to reach a point where you could play a mission, that we realised we had some problems.

PC Gamer: You guys have been through a lot. How do you think Introversion has changed in over the years?

Chris Delay: Yeah we have been through a lot, and it feels like we’ve been doing this for a long time now. Uplink feels like a different era altogether, closer to University for me than Introversion. Each person at Introversion sees our history slightly differently. I think we had our most incredible years when we were doing Darwinia and then Defcon straight after – both games we are hugely proud of. We also took the IGF prize around the same time in 2006, and did the Steam deal, which continues to be our best business partnership to this day. I mean, we just love Valve to bits! How often does one company make so many of your favourite games AND provide you with the best storefront for your own work? Once Defcon was done we started expanding, and I feel like we fell off the boil quite seriously, pursuing a console version of Darwinia which shipped in 2010, way later than planned. Multiwinia was part of that project (being the multiplayer component to Darwinia that Microsoft required for their console), and that also fell a little flat, I think it’s our weakest game, although I’m still very happy with it, and disappointed more people didn’t play it in the end. During this time we scaled up to ten fulltime staff in a London office and a handful of freelancers, so it was getting pretty big for a while.

But now all that is over, we are back to the original three founders and some highly talented freelancers, all working out of our bedrooms once again (Myself and Mark both work in bedrooms now, that isn’t a lie) and it feels like the old Introversion again. Our core mission now is to make the next original game, and that was our intention when we started out in 2001, and I think that’s a very healthy mission for an indie game developer. For a while during 2008 and 2009 I don’t think you could say that was our core mission, so it feels good to be back.

Helicopters are brilliant. Unlike boring old planes, they're not confined to just going forwards and tilting a bit. That makes them perfect for plopping SWAT teams on rooftops, sneaking through thick jungles, rescuing people from listing boats and all that other exciting stuff that planes miss out on because they're going too damn fast.

Complete all the tasks mentioned above and more in Bohemia Interactive's Take On Helicopters, out today. The launch trailer not only shows off the wide variety of missions, but also the enormous cityscapes Bohemia's excellent Arma tech generates so well. Find out more in our Take On Helicopters interview with Bohemia Interactive creative lead, Jay Crowe. You'll find a list of physical and digital retailers at which to purchase Take On Helicopters on the Take On Helicopters site.

We were utterly impressed with 16-bit-style point-and-clicker Gemini Rue, which combines a beautifully scummy atmosphere with proper adult sci-fi storytelling. It’s already shown up in the Indie Royale bundle, but it’s also been added to Steam’s growing catalogue of point and click adventure titles. The Steam version adds a couple of new features - cloud saving, and 15 in-game achievements.

"I can't begin to say how excited we are to have Gemini Rue on Steam," said Wadjet Eye's CEO Dave Gilbert. "We've worked very hard to get here and the support from hardcore gamers has been invaluable."

But we're left with a dilemma. Do we get it off-Steam for £3.34 with three other games thrown in via Indie Royale? Or do we head to Steam and pay almost twice as much for the single game, plus achievements to brag to our mates about? This is probably the most important thing we'll ever have to think about. What are you going to do, dear reader?

EDIT: According to Indie Royale's Twitter, the pack does include a Steam code for Gemini Rue - but you'll only get it once the bundle's finished. Thanks Random2323, another dilemma solved!

Interplay’s Fallout MMO has scored another small victory against Bethesda, who are trying to stop the post-apocalyptic multiplayer title getting off the ground, according to CVG.

Bethesda wanted a preliminary injunction against the MMO, which would stop Interplay’s continuing development of the title. However, the United States Court of Appeals has denied the move.

Bethesda bought the Fallout series from Interplay in 2007, on the condition that Interplay would be able to develop an MMO. Interplay published the first two Fallout titles way back at the beginning of time, and Bethesda developed and published Fallout 3 and New Vegas.

Bethesda’s been attempting to gauss rifle Interplay into the ground over rights to the MMO, with Bethesda asserting that Interplay has only licensed one asset from the Fallout franchise - its name. However, this was dismissed by Interplay as “absurd.”

The case is likely to keep on going like some kind of indestructible sad Ghoul. With Interplay running desparately low on funds, it had better end soon though.

On top of Fallout 3 influences and crime-reporting chickens, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim introduces a new concept: infidelity. Game director Todd Howard spilled all the dark secrets from his bedroom when he spoke to us about the intentional but unexpected events that Skyrim's procedural Radiant quest system can turn up.

“I had decided to marry this one woman who was my friend,” Howard begins. “I forgot that I had done this Radiant quest for this other guy, who turns out he had liked her...”

Despite a bright start, Howard’s new virtual marriage wasn’t an entirely happy one. “When you get married, you can decide where you live - if you own a house, your spouse can move in with you, or you can move in with them,” says Howard. “So I had owned a house in the city of Whiterun, and asked her, ‘OK we should live there.’ I went there, and she hadn’t arrived yet, so I decided to wait - I slept.”

Despite being sound asleep in his own home, an interloper arrived. “Then she showed up, and I turned around and she was standing there, I saw another door open to another bedroom and the other guy walked out!” says Howard. “If you make him like her, he then visits her every day, and doesn’t care if she’s married.”

"It’s my wedding night, guy walks out of the bedroom!"

The “Radiant” feature Howard refers to is Skyrim’s unique storytelling engine, which changes NPC's roles in the world depending on your choices during quests. And also provides enough storylines for another three years of Eastenders.

This feature originally ran in PC Gamer UK issue 232. Check out our Video Blog about the photoshoot for behind the scenes footage.

Artemis isn’t an official Star Trek game, but it is the Star Trek game you’ve always dreamed of. It’s a bridge simulator, in which multiple players take on the roles of starship crew. There are six slots in a bridge crew: a captain, a helmsman, a weapons master, an engineer, a science officer and comms. The captain hosts a server. Everyone else logs into the server to play their role. Everyone but the captain gets their own screen and their own jobs. To succeed, crew members must communicate and work together. Science officers need to provide bearings and scan readings to helmsmen and weapons officers. Engineers need to divert power between the warp drive and weapons. Everyone needs to listen to the captain’s orders.

Artemis is an exciting new take on asymmetric cooperative multiplayer.

Whisper it, but it’s basically liveaction roleplaying with viewscreens. Without pausing to read any instructions or forum posts, the PC Gamer team flung itself into a randomly generated mission. What could possibly go... oh.

Episode One - The Kobayashi MaruStardate: Wednesday. Lunchtime. About a quarter past one.

Our rookie crew has embarked upon a randomly generated combat mission without looking at the manual, Wiki or readme. We quickly choose our roles and launch the game. No one has any idea how to play, or what the buttons do. All we know is that there are enemy cruisers out there, and we have to kill them.

Captain Tim Edwards: I’ve made my first decision of the day. I’ll command the Starship Artemis with my feet on the desk, eating a sandwich. This will be known as ‘The Edwards manoeuvre’. As I do this, my T-shirt rides slightly up. I pull it back down. No no no. Straightening my T-shirt will be called ‘The Edwards manoeuvre’. My first order to the crew: “What the hell is going on?”

Science Officer Graham Smith: As our ship’s Science Officer, I assume I’ll be standing off to Tim’s right, looking stern and raising a single, curious eyebrow at confusing human ‘feelings’. Which sounds like a regular Thursday. Instead, my screen is a muddle of numbers and graphs. The first screen has a triangle in the middle, with three lines poking out and a circle around it. The second screen has an empty grid with space in it. The third screen shows a poorly rendered 3D spaceship.

I check the computer’s databanks (the Artemis Wiki, bit.ly/artemiswiki) to find out what the hell I’m supposed to be doing. While being the sexy voice of reason, I can also use the ship’s long-range scanners to bring up tiny numbers about enemy ships. Like that enemy ship half a dozen sectors away.

Tim orders us to attack – or rather, “Attaaaaaaaack!” I relay their position to our Helmsman, Tom Senior, so he can plot a course, and then let Weapons Officer Tom Hatfield know their shield frequency so he can program the torpedoes. Our course is set and we… go nowhere.

Owen ‘Welshy’ Hill: I’m the engineer, which means I control the power to everything on the ship. Except, as soon as I load the game up, I’m confronted with a giant screen covered with blue blobs. The rest of the team seem to know what they’re doing and are gleefully making jokes and shouting out instructions. I think back to the two episodes of Star Trek I’ve seen. What do the engineers do? What is warp? What is impulse? I vaguely remember something about lithium crystals. Ah, it’ll come to me. I tell Tim that I’ve got impulse engines, shields and warp power. And repair crews. He asks if I know what I’m doing. I nod sagely.

“Then why aren’t we moving?”

“I’m sure the helmsman will know.”

Phew. Dodged that one.

Senior Ensign Tom Senior: Finally, I get to pilot a starship. It’s my job to get from point A to point B via either sluggish impulse propulsion, or warp speed – which is so powerful it reduces your ship to a smear that streaks across the galaxy. As I jump into the game I half expect to see a bank of complex course-plotting software. The reality is, thankfully, much simpler. A small green icon in the centre represents the ship. It’s surrounded by a ring, labelled with bearing degrees.

But where’s the ‘go fast’ button? Oh, there it is, a pair of small sliders at the bottom left of the screen. What happens if I set warp to maximum? Absolutely nothing. There’s no power. I’m not in charge of that.

Welshy: Oh no. Everyone’s looking at me again. Apparently I’m in charge of power. I’m starting to figure this out. I can use sliders to distribute power across different systems. I should put all of our power to impuuuuuuuuuuuuullllse... That works. We’re no longer docked.

Uhurich McCormick: I’m working the communications rig and am supposed to use the ship’s arrays to chat directly with the things hanging in space around us: to secure docking permissions, check the status of allied ships, things like that. I’d previously been wittering away happily with the station’s manufacturing teams to get some more photon torpedoes, but out in the inky blackness of the void, there’s no one to talk to. Aww. Wait, we’ve just scooted past something!

Some red dots on the ship’s scanner. I call over to Graham and ask for his expert analysis on what they are. “Red dot things, over there!” he squeaks. Thanks, Graham. Are they hostile? Let’s find out.

I bring up my communicator and find their designations. They’re marked under ‘enemies’. Time for a chat. I have four gambits with which to begin my fledgling diplomatic career, three of which are insults. I think today I’ll start with their mothers.

Science Officer Smith: I scan the ships, which brings up little numbers next to their names. “There’s a Torgoth Cruiser and it has RS200 and FS150! Does anyone know what that means? Also, (M74) BRG, DMG and 2K! Guys, I think we’re fighting a motorway.”

T’om Hatfield, Son of Martyn: Torpedoes! I have torpedoes! Not just torpedoes, but mines and nukes too! I always wanted to nuke space! I click on an enemy ship and a little circle appears around it. Did I just target it? I think I did. Graham tells me to turn to frequency E, which I do. Apparently that will make my phasers hit harder, so it’s a shame I have no idea where the ‘fire phasers’ button is then.

The screen shakes. Owen cries out something about damage. Wait – shields! I have those. They should probably be up right now…

Senior Ensign Senior: I’m starting to learn that piloting a starship isn’t just about going fast in a straight line. I can see our firing arcs projected around our craft. Different weapons can fire in different directions. This close to the enemy, manoeuvring becomes a precise dance as I try to stay away from enemy firing arcs.

Uhurich: The red alert button makes a ‘WEE-OO-WEE-OO’ noise. I turn it off and on again. I’m helping!

T’om, Son of Martyn: The phasers fire by themselves! Awesome, I don’t have to do anything! Even better, I’ve figured out how to raise the shields. Unfortunately, so has Tom Senior. As a result, he accidentally lowers the shields as soon as I’ve put them up. Then I put them up and he brings them down. It’s like running into someone in a narrow corridor and awkwardly swaying from side to side, only instead of mild embarrassment, we’re risking hot laser death.

Welshy: “Is it good to have a big power number or a little power number? Either way, power equals zero!”

Captain Tim: I have to take control of the situation. The sandwich is now ignored. I bang my fist on the desk. “Everyone, quiet. Weapons, put the shields up. Engineering, damage control crews to weapons. Helm, get us out of here. Comms and science, tell me what we’re dealing with.”

I’m so excited I think I could squee.

Uhurich: I put the red alert on again. Tim looks at me in a certain way. I turn it off. “Sorry.”

Senior Ensign Senior: Someone just said, “Get us out of here.” With my mouse, I grab the warp slider and whack it up to maximum. Wheee!

Uhurich: We whizz forward a short distance, out of our foes’ weapon range. Our short hop gives me just enough time to bring up my communicator and fire off one final insult at our aggressors. There seems to be no real use for the insults besides winding the window down and shouting “FUUUCK YOOOOU” as we drive away. We run a classy ship.

Captain Tim: Hey. We have mines. And nukes. I have a plan. “Engineering, how are the repairs? Weapons, load nukes. Science, tell me which red dot is in the centre. Comms, target that ship. Helm, come about. And will someone turn that sodding red alert klaxon off?”

Uhurich: “Sorry.”

Welshy: “Everything is still flashing!”

Captain Tim: “This is what we’re going to do. We’ll fire a nuke at the centre ship. As soon as it hits, we’ll burst through, firing torpedoes. As we burn through the cloud, we’ll drop a mine. Then we’ll come about and finish them all off with our phasers.”

Uhurich: No, this is my moment. I press the ‘red alert’ button and sit back satisfied. A job well done.

Senior Ensign Senior: No no no. This is my moment. “Full speed ahead!”

T’om, Son of Martyn: I think you’ll find that this is my moment. Tom brings us in close enough to fire the nuke. I fire, and then hit reload. Oh no. It takes an age to reload. We’re not going to be ready for…

Senior Ensign Senior: I’m flying us directly into a nuclear blast. I don’t know how this happened. We’re going too fast and won’t be able to…

Welshy: If you put all the sliders to maximum, you see a bar labelled ‘overheating’. It’s in red. I wonder what that...

Science Officer Smith: The nuke hits. We’re caught in the blast, taking down the entire front of the vessel. Our phasers are offline, our torpedoes are offline. We come to a complete stop.

Captain Tim: Many of the enemy are damaged but they’re still able to fire. Tom’s impulse charge has left us bang in the centre of their fleet. We’re doomed. “Abandon desks!”

Artemis explodes around us. I’m so depressed I bin my sandwich.

Welshy: “So. What does ‘warp’ mean anyway? I’ve only ever watched two episodes of Star Trek.”

Episode Two - The Next Generation

Stardate: Thursday. About half-past three.

The PC Gamer team have interrupted their work day to complete the Siege of Hamak, a fully voiced and scripted episode of Artemis. This is it: we’re now out of the combat simulator and into… the simulator. We have no idea what situation the game will throw at us. We just know that, at some point, voice acting will be involved.

We’ve also made some personnel changes. Our idiotic Welsh engineer has been ejected from the nearest airlock, replaced by PC Gamer’s second biggest Star Trek fan, Tom.

Tom O’Francis: “What? You started without me? How could you start without me? I’m at least the second biggest Star Trek nerd on this team! While I was out wasting my time playing Diablo 3, you were all cavorting around the alpha quadrant? I will never-”

Wait – I’m over it. I’ve just seen how many sliders I have. This is the happiest day of my life. “What’s our mission?”

Uhurich: “Tom, you should really know this mission – you were the one who sent us the .zip file to extract into our Artemis folders.”

O’Francis: “Ah, yes.”

Uhurich: “Wait, everyone shut up a second. We’re being bombarded with messages. I’m going to play them. Tim, say, ‘On screen’ so we sound like we know what we’re doing.”

Captain Tim: “On screen.”

Uhurich: “Thanks.” I play the messages from a Captain Haynes and an Admiral Weeks. Two things become apparent. One: we’ve been asked to go and collect something called a ‘ramscoop’ at the Hamak space station in the bottom left of the Hamak sector, before pitching back out into space to collect wibbly nebula bits to give us energy for some reason. And two: fan-made missions in Artemis sometimes come with voiceovers. Exuberant voiceovers.

The crew cringes through three messages, as an over-enunciating Haynes explains why she calls Weeks ‘Squeaks’. I quietly delete the messages so we never have to listen to them again.

O’Francis: I’ve heard from the crew that their last engineer recklessly squandered their energy reserves and had to be fired into space. As the new crew member, I realise that Pulaski’s Law dictates I’m the most likely to be hated by the fans, so I’m keen not to make the same mistake. I keep all auxiliary systems on half power and resist the urge to overcharge our warp engines for a speed boost. I am doing excellent engineering.

Science Officer Smith: I’m looking at the space grid and I’ve just worked out which little dot is us. We’re down in the bottom left of the map, surrounded by what we scientists call purple wibbly stuff. We’re headed towards the space station in the bottom right. We’re heading incredibly slowly towards that space station. No, no, I’m wrong. We’ve stopped. We’re out of power again. “What the hell, new guy! Wait, I mean: This seems illogical, Captain.”

Captain Tim: “What the hell, new guy!”

O’Francis: “Some kind of anomaly, sir! In as much as I thought we’d be OK when we are in fact boned.”

I don’t understand it – usually the old girl speaks to me. Granted, that’s sort of dependent on me paying attention to these readouts saying we’re running out of energy. Look, I can fix this. I’m cutting off power to tactical, weapons, manoeuvring, shields and impulse engines. There’s definitely no downside to this. We’re now regenerating power at one point every minute.We’ll be back to full in... 1,000 divided by 60, carry the six recurring... 16 hours and 40 minutes.

I am doing excellent engineering.

Captain Tim: “Team: fix this shit. Now! I have a meeting with Ads in an hour.”

T’om, Son of Martyn: We’re stranded in space. Upside: no enemies. Downside: we can’t move. With no enemies, there’s nothing for me to do but polish my forehead ridges. Wait – what’s this? “Guys! I can convert one of our torpedoes into energy!”

O’Francis: “We could also eat the crew for food but I think we should probably avoid that until we have to. We’ve only got 16 hours and 39 minutes left.”

Captain Tim: “Do it! Eat them all!”

Uhurich: “Don’t worry guys, we can just restock on torpedoes at the Hamak station. I gave them a call a few minutes ago, and after I’d told them their parents were terrible creatures and they’d never amount to anything, I asked them to build us some weapons for free. I can’t see why they wouldn’t.”

T’om, Son of Martyn: I load a shovelful of torpedoes into the mighty space furnace powering our vessel and our energy reserves leap upwards. It’s not a lot, but it might be enough to reach the station. It’s a crazy plan, but it could just be crazy enough to work.

Senior Ensign Senior: Sweet weapons-grade energy flows into the engines. I can fly again! Time to pick a random direction and go as fast as I can that way.

Science Officer Smith: My scanners are down, as Engineer O’Francis has put all of the ship’s limited power towards the engines. I ask for some juice and instantly see the station. “Set a course for 110°, Helmsman! Because space is two-dimensional.”

Senior Ensign Senior: “Aye aye, sir!” We’re not even slightly going in that direction and there’s no power to manoeuvre. I turn the ship as fast as I can. It slowly arcs towards the station with the grace of a deluded whale.

T’om, Son of Martyn: Thanks to Rich’s earlier order, the station has built up a nice stock of torpedoes and as soon as we arrive, my supplies replenish. I also have a nuke, which I now know fires in a straight line and explodes in a burst. A large burst. A burst we should not go into.

Uhurich: On our exit from the Hamak station, we receive another wave of messages. I try to play them, but our weapons and science officers are conducting a loud discussion about energy levels over the top of the transmissions. How do I insult them again? Ah yeah, with my own face.

“Guys, be quiet. Also, you suck.”

I play the messages again. There are some Tachyon sources, apparently, and they’re ‘unknown’. I wonder if I can insult them.

Science Officer Smith: With power and scanners now operational, I can see the world around us. It’s purple and wibbly still, but within that, I’m also detecting three Unknown Tachyon Sources. A friendly ship, the Warsaw, is checking them out, bragging about how they’re going to discover the cause before us. Oh yeah? We’ll see about that. “Helmsman! Boldly set a course to go boldly where no person has boldly gone before: Unknown Tachyon Source #1.”

Captain Tim: It’s been a few minutes since I told anyone what to do and I’m beginning to get nervous. A crew is only as good as it’s leader, and that means I need to step up. “Helmsman! Do whatever it was that Science Officer Smith just said.”

Oh yeah. I’m a manager.

Senior Ensign Senior: Without a bearing to work with, a helmsman is left only with his instincts, and my instincts say, “Look at the long-range scanners and head towards the thing Graham just said.”

I see a mysterious blob in a nearby sector and power us towards it. As we depart, Rich receives an incoming message from Admiral Weeks. It says something about us now owning a share in an arms-trading company, and the torpedoes more than covering the cost of our energy scooper. I have no idea what that means, but whatever. Onwards!

Uhurich: “We’ve had a message from Captain Haynes suggesting that we’re far behind combat lines and incredibly unlikely to be attacked. Suggested course of action: divert all power to shields, move at half impulse and look suspiciously out of the window.”

O’Francis: “At some point we really need to talk about the torpedoes.”

T’om, Son of Martyn: “This is a good point. I’m no longer registering any torpedoes on board. I assume that’s because miserly Chief Engineer Ebeneezer O’Francis has shut off power to weapons between fights, right?”

O’Francis: “That would make it my fault, so it can’t possibly be that. I think it’s because we’re at warp. That would make it Ensign Senior’s fault, something I think we can all live with.”

Senior Ensign Senior: I get the feeling that somehow, somewhere, someone is blaming me for something. No matter, all power to the engines!

Uhurich: I have a horrible gnawing sensation in my gut. Am I hungry? No, it’s not that.

Oh. Wait. Didn’t one of the messages we received mention something about torpedoes? Hang on, I’ll play it back.

The crew sits obediently as Weeks explains how he sold our torpedo contingent for shares in an arms dealer’s company. We are weaponless. Fortunately, we’re in a sector that hasn’t seen conflict in 20 years. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

Science Officer Smith: I’m beginning to realise there’s not a lot for me to do as the Science Officer. I look at the scanners; there’s nothing there. I whirl them around, checking every direction. Nope, nothing there. Shouldn’t I have more to do? Tim is the captain, so he gets all the good lines, but I get more fanmail than he does. I’ve done fucking Shakespeare, I bring an air of class to this. Sigh. Maybe I should ask if I can direct an- wait. Wait. “Everyone shut up for a second.”

Uhurich: “We’ve just received a message from Captain Haynes on board the Warsaw – they’re under attack from those Torgoth thingies, and they sound a bit dead. Permission to turn the red alert button off and on again really fast for a legitimate reason this time.”

Too late, I’m doing it anyway. I think it’s helping morale.

O’Francis: Everything is flashing red. Enemies are everywhere. We have no torpedoes. It’s time to blow this sector. Helmsman!

Senior Ensign Senior: I need more manoeuvrability! Tom does something complicated and suddenly our space whale becomes a nimble minnow. I flip the ship around in seconds. We hightail the ship all the way back to the space station, where the torpedoes live, but there’s a problem. They have no torpedoes. No torpedoes at all.

T’om, Son of Martyn: Right, Rich has forgotten to order torpedoes so we aren’t getting any. But wait – if I can turn torpedoes into energy, surely I can turn energy into torpedoes. That makes sense, right?

It doesn’t, but I can anyway. I assume we must have some sort of replicator system installed. Anyway, since we’re docked at a station, we effectively have infinite energy. This means I have unlimited torpedoes. Actually, eight. Since that’s how many I can carry. Still, it was nice to dream.

O’Francis: “Sir, I’m receiving word from the Artemis Wiki I just Alt+Tabbed that increasing power to warp engines actually makes them more efficient, not less.

“On the downside, this means it was totally my fault we ran out of power. On the upside, it means we can now head out with warp engines running at 300% power and not feel bad about it. Permission to refer to this as Warp Factor Woo.”

Captain Tim: “Permission… granted.”

Senior Ensign Senior: We undock from the space station. I point us at the distant enemies. Warp Factor Woo, engage.

The ship makes a noise like a washing machine on heat and we ping across the system. We pass one sector, another sector, and another in a matter of seconds. I abandon the helmsman’s traditional quiet dignity and professionalism for a moment to say, “Wwwwoooah!” This is exactly why I pretended to join Starfleet.

I overshoot drastically and plonk us right in the middle of the swarm of enemies. There’s a chorus of worried noises from the rest of the crew. I enter Warp Factor Woo quickly once more and blast through the pack. I call to O’Francis for manoeuvrability and speed from moment to moment, keeping the ship out of enemy firing arcs. Behind me, Graham is calling out ship numbers and ship types. He actually sounds like a bridge officer.

We’re in position. We have our targets. The rest is up to whoever it is that controls the nukes.

T’om, Son of Martyn: I open with attack pattern delta, also known as attack pattern fire-anuke- and-yell-frantically-at-the- helm-to-bank-right, and it does serious damage to the whole group. Then I start picking them off one by one with torpedoes and weapons, Graham relaying the right frequencies for each ship in turn.

Somewhere in the middle of this I realise that I can manually target my beams on certain systems. I try to knock out the enemy engines so they can’t escape. Resistance is futile, little red dot men.

Uhurich: As the rest of the crew do important things such as flying and shooting and stopping us from being sucked out into the cold vacuum of space to have our eyeballs shatter, I’m aiming staccato insults at our targets. Boom! We blow out their primary beam. “You suck at cricket!” Bang! We knock out their forward shield. “That shirt makes you look like a Ferengi!”

As we destroy our third ship, I realise there’s another dialogue option next to my insults: ‘Surrender.’ I decide to aim it at the fourth ship in our gunsights. Immediately, they give up and limp off. I keep my remorse for the souls we’ve already killed quiet and systematically ask every other ship in the area to surrender. One we pummelled on the way in does, but the others keep up their barrage. Torpedoes hurtle toward us. Then there’s a crunch.

Science Officer Smith: “Shut up again! We’ve just been hit by something!”

Uhurich: “I’m theatrically swaying!”

Captain Tim: “Damage report!”

O’Francis: “Everything!”

Captain Tim: “Can you be more specific please?”

O’Francis: “All the things! All the things are damaged.” We’ve lost everything – tactical, manoeuvring, front shields, rear shields, beam weapons, torpedoes. I guess we have engines. I set full power to engines.

Senior Ensign Senior: Somehow, our strategy of flying into our own thermonuclear explosion has again proven to be our downfall, but we’re not dead yet. Every system on the ship is failing except one. As long as the engines have power, there’s a way out. I set the warp slider to maximum and we blast away to the safety of the space station once again.

O’Francis: Unfortunately, docking does not automatically repair our ship. My screen – a schematic of the ship – is a mess of red dots, all concentrated on one half of the vessel. I show it to Smith.

“Look, all of this damage was done to the rear while you guys were asking me for full power to the front shields!”

Science Officer Smith: “That is the front of the ship.”

O’Francis: “Right. OK then.”

I’m trying to direct my repair teams around the ship’s corridors from this schematic view, but they keep refusing to move to critical systems. The last straw is when several members of one team die while walking between two undamaged sectors. When you can’t count on surviving an encounter with a corridor, you may not be Artemis’s best and brightest.

Eventually I figure it out: they have to repair non-critical ship sectors to get past them to the critical ones.

Captain Tim: “How long are these repairs going to take?”

O’Francis: “At least 25 minutes.”

Captain Tim: “OK.”

T’om, Son of Martyn: “You’re supposed to say it has to be done in half that.”

O’Francis: It is done in half that – it turns out that once I clear a few corridors, it gets a lot faster to move my crews around. I’m secretly really enjoying this – I had no idea the repair system was so involved. For the first time in my life I get to meaningfully say, “All systems nominal,” and we undock to engage the final group.

Science Officer Smith: I swing my scanners toward that final group and find out it’s more like a final one. Our parting nuke was enough to make our previous aggressors surrender. One unidentified tachyon source, coming right for us.

Captain Tim: “Weapons, arm nukes.”

T’om, Son of Martyn: “Nukes, sir? Are you sure? We can take him out with torpedoes.”

Captain Tim: “Nukes. Lovely, lovely nukes.”

Senior Ensign Senior: I undock the ship and set a course heading straight for the anomaly.

Uhurich: The unknown tachyon source is so unknown that I can’t communicate with it. I put it on Tim’s main screen to get a better look at it.

It looks like a normal cruiser, the weakest of the Torgath ships. Nukes are powerful enough to take down three in one blast. I remember our last nuking. This could get messy.

Captain Tim: A good captain remembers the times he almost led his crew into self-perpetrated nuclear doom and resolves to be more cautious in the future. “Science Officer, scan target. Helms, get us into nuke range. Weapons, prepare armament. Fire, then take us out of here at 300% warp.”

T’om, Son of Martyn: “Nuke fired.”

Captain Tim: “Engage!”

Science Officer Smith: Launched out of the sector at physically improbable speeds, I flick my scanners over to where the last Tachyon source had been. There’s nothing there now. There’s nothing on long-range scanners either. “I think that’s mission accomplished, captain.”

If you want to try the game out for yourself, you can buy it at the Artemis website.

In World of Warcraft, balance is king. With such a huge userbase, it’s essential to ensure noobs are able to play the game without feeling frustrated. At the same time hardcore players need a tooth-grindingly tough experience.

We caught up with World of Warcraft's lead systems designer, Greg Street at Blizzcon. He admits that most recent expansion Cataclysm got it a bit wrong. “In Wrath of the Lich King we heard from our players that the PvE content was too easy,” says Street. “So we were like okay, clearly what we need to do is make the PvE content harder, which we did for Cataclysm and then players told us ‘it’s too hard, I can’t handle it!’”

Blizzard’s solution in Mists of Pandaria is to introduce varying difficulty levels for different players. “Halo had like five difficulty levels, Civilisation had eight or something,” says Street. But Pandaria won’t introduce set difficulty levels per se, instead delivering a range of experiences within Pandaria’s world. “On the hard end we want it to be at the hard end of Cataclysm, but then on the easier end we want it to be on the level of Lich King.”

How do you apply difficulty levels to such a varied game? By setting fire to players. “On a harder boss we might say ‘if you stand in the fire you will die, you cannot stand in the fire’” says Street. “On easier difficulty levels we might make it so you can stand in there for a while and with enough healing you can maybe just ignore it completely and stand in there, or you have enough time for someone to say, ‘Hey dude, you really should get out of that.’”

In addition, Pandaria will feature a new “challenge mode”, where dungeons become competitive arenas. According to Street, the wider audience of players aren’t interested in multiple attempts at taking a boss down. "They just want to kill the boss, and for them that’s kind of the end of the story for their character and they’re totally happy for that. It was really a very different experience from the traditional raiding model and so we’re trying to offer something for both groups of players."